Copyright Violation

I've noticed more blogs increasingly lifting personal photos from social networking sites and marketing the subject as a target of assassination. Regardless of unfavorable opinion and jeers from the cowardly peanut gallery, when an individual comes a photo which was lifted without their permission, what action may one take? Both are members of WordPress.

The photographer is the owner of every photo that they have taken. Even if 2 people take an identical photograph, each photographer will own their own photograph. This includes popular tourist attractions which have their pictures taken several thousand times per day, the photographs may not be terribly unique, but each photo taken is still the property of it's photographer. The term of the copyright is from the time the photo was taken until the remainder of the year you die, plus 50 years.

That's Canadian law, I'm assuming there's something similar in American law.

If your photo is being used by a WordPress.COM user you should contact WordPress support staff. They're generally very good at sorting out copyright claims, if the person abusing your photos is on a hosted site try contacting the host directly.

"Character assassination" also counts as "defamation/libel". You may want to collect screenshots of the site for any later legal action.

If you're not doing so already I'd suggest keeping future photos at a low resolution when posting them to the web, and a smaller "height/width" ratio. It's also a really good idea to put some sort of watermark on them to identify your copyright claim.

Doing both gives you the automatic proof the photo copyright belongs to you, in case you have to prove the photo is yours.

Death threats are also illegal under US law, and WordPress.com does take those kinds of things quite seriously. The Kathy Sierra saga probably would have been shut down if it had happened on a WP.com blog. Report the blog:

You can't just say "That's me take that photo down or I will sue you" (which we get every day).

You need to follow the dmca procedure.
You don't need a lawyer, it isn't that complicated. But you do need to do it.

Bear in mind that if they have your image and a whole lot of negative stuff all we will probably do is ask for the image to be removed. Being nasty to someone is not something we will usually stop - it's all part of freedom of speech.

What if we take a picture but we write the source, for example I copied a picture to my post from another WordPress blog, but in the end of the post I wrote: pictures taken from: "blablabla.wordpress.com". Is it okay to do that??

It is TOTALLY up to the person who took the picture. Legally, you have no protection. In my personal experience, as long as you make the credit a LINK to the file on their site, they're generally (but not always) okay with it.

I didn't realize she was being literal with the assassination threat... "uttering a death threat" is illegal in Canada, but interpreting intent is the tricky part:

To secure a conviction at trial, the Crown must prove that the person making the threat did so knowingly. That is, the prosecution must show that he was aware of the words used and the meaning they would convey. It also must show that he intended the threat to be taken seriously, that is, to intimidate or strike fear into the recipient. It is not necessary that the person making the threat intend to carry it out or be capable of doing so. The motive for making the threat is equally irrelevant.

If someone is threatening your life, online or off, you should contact the police right away.